St. Paul and I Agree...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
This is a non-human example of reciprocal altruism.
ReplyDeleteI see you're getting economism down!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Ryan, did you see I revised my estimate of Rowe's model after his comments here? I was misled by his descriptions of the model.
I am firmly against model blindness. I just don't see how this should change the priors of modern people who believe that nature is very violent, typically.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I have little to add with respect to the argument across the blogs in general, which is why for the most part I kept my head down...
"the priors" -- a few more years of education, Ryan, and you will achieve complete incomprehensibility to all but 100 other people!
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